15 answers answered between 1996 and 2026
Originally asked
Krista Tippett, to her guests, On Being
Krista Tippett uses this as a recurring, sometimes-closing On Being question; the wording is intentionally adapted to each guest.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.
I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal's 'thinking reed' really does capture it, because I'm just a bunch of dead muscles thinking.
Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask … It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
When I was a child the mailman came once a day. Now the mail arrives every moment. I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.
It is in human nature to contain both the positive and the negative. However, it is also within human capability to work to reinforce the positive and to minimize or neutralize the negative.
Nobody has answered this one yet.